Varieties of mystical experience in the writings of Virginia Woolf

Twentieth Century Literature, Winter, 1995 by Julie Kane

But in late 1926, Woolf began to entertain the idea of writing a serious work about a heroine whose consciousness was somehow not bounded by time:

Yet I am now & then haunted by some semi mystic very profound life of a woman, which shall all be told on one occasion; & time shall be utterly obliterated; future shall somehow blossom out of the past. One incident - say the fall of a flower - might contain it. My theory being that the event practically does not exist - nor time either. (Diary 3:118)

By March of 1927 the image had swum into sharper focus: "I toyed vaguely with some thoughts of a flower whose petals fall; of time all telescoped into one lucid channel through which my heroine was to pass at will" (3:131). Then in October of 1927 Woolf suddenly split the idea of the non-time-bound heroine off from the serious, quasi-mystical symbol of the flower. The former became the germ of Orlando, which Woolf called a "joke," an "escapade" (3:162, 168); the latter eventually metamorphosed into The Moths, later retitled The Waves.

It appears that in 1927 Woolf was not yet ready to confront her own "mystical feelings." First she had to get her feet wet by treating the non-temporality of the human soul as a joke. Thus Orlando deals lightheartedly with many of the issues being seriously debated by the Cambridge reincarnationists. Over a four-hundred-year time span, Orlando periodically falls into a seven-day comatose state and "reincarnates," once changing gender from male to female. Each existence presents Orlando with a new set of circumstances and moral choices. Karma, the "universal law of retributive justice" (Blavatsky 120), appears to be operating: rejected by a woman as a man in one life, Orlando rejects male suitors as a woman in the next. The karmic debt racked up during a lifetime devoted to material luxuries is repaid by a lifetime devoted to art. Orlando's personality changes from existence to existence, and some memories become blurred, but, consistent with reincarnationist teachings, essential "dispositions and tendencies" are carried over intact from one lifetime to the next (Head 405):

She had been a gloomy boy, in love with death, as boys are; and then she had been amorous and florid; and then she had been sprightly and satirical; and sometimes she had tried prose and sometimes she had tried the drama. Yet through all those changes she had remained, she reflected, fundamentally the same. She had the same brooding meditative temper, the same love of animals and nature, the same passion for the country and the seasons. (237)

Orlando also seeks to evolve spiritually over the course of his/her lifetimes, consistent with Hindu/Theosophical teachings about the soul's progressive ascent toward Nirvana. Throughout the book, Woolf's tongue remains in her cheek. She speaks of "these selves of which we are built up, one on top of another, as plates are piled on a waiter's hand" (308); ultimately her heroine, "who believed in no immortality, could not help feeling that her soul would come and go forever with the reds on the panels and the greens on the sofa" (317).